Interview with Nigel Forward:
veteran WWII code-breaker of Bletchley Park

By Fuzzbuddy

MLA:   How did you come to work at Bletchley Park?

NF: It was the Old Boy network. An operation between recruiting bods; there was Gordon Welchman who worked on the site. He had contacts in the universities and schools, and used them unashamedly to plunder schools like Marlborough, Winchester and Manchester Grammar. I was seventeen when they chose me, and I remember my Maths tutor saying to me "I think this is an offer you can't refuse". To this day I am still very glad that I did go.

MLA: What were the working and living conditions like?

NF: Most people lived in billets. It was adequate, not a problem. Some people changed their quarters, and some people were able to do some personal research. For a while I was a substitute son for a local schoolteacher whose son had gone off to the war, and I stayed in their house. Nobody complained about the food except the ex-dons, who were probably used to better from university fare.

After the war Bletchley Park was shut down, all the documents and the machinery were burnt and destroyed, so that what we had been doing would be kept secret, and the Germans would not be able to find out that we had cracked Enigma. The blueprints for Colossus (the first programmable computer) were carefully kept, I think.

MLA:   Did you work directly with the Enigma machine? What was the breakthrough like?

NF: we worked in shifts, with about 5 people in the day shifts, less at night.   The night shifts were enjoyable. They were fluid groups, so you were always working alongside different people. There were other groups around ours that were working on interrelated problems too. Your metabolism would get used to the shift in a couple of weeks, and then it would change again.

There were three possible work periods. 8am to 4pm; 4pm to midnight and midnight to 8am. I worked in hut 6 with the Cryptographic group, which must have been around 25-30 souls. I remember the chap directly in charge of us was called John Manesty who was very dictatorial, yet fair.

I did crack the code known as "Red", which was one of the keys to the whole game. It was to do with transport. We were looking for ways into the code, and as we found one key it made it easier to find others.

There was also a lot of harmless fun. We had a logbook, in which we would put comments like "Red broke at xxx time". Pretty soon we started an "Anti-Log" full of midnight ramblings. Paul Coles invented a fictitious code-breaker set during the civil war, and stopped it in 1640; it ended with "his tenure of office came to an abrupt end when Fairfox started using landlines". It was anachronistic, but very funny; Fairfox was around after the civil war had ended.

The codes were changed every month, and even daily so each time we had to start again from scratch. There would be a very long message, it would then start again, and we were looking for indicators in it.

One of the things that made it easier for us to crack was that the Germans used their girlfriends' names, so the same name turned up more than once. They also used to make jokes, like writing "bugger all the English". They also made the mistake of sending messages in an absolutely standard form, e.g. a long address, the name of the division, then a very formal message.

So we were always doodling and looking for patterns. One useful discovery was that they almost always used the same wheel order, as if they had bundles of paper in a hat with their favourite wheel orders in to choose from. We had to use a lot of intelligent guess work as well, and one example ??? meant a reduction in potential code. There was an enormous potential for encryption, but human instinct turned up and somehow showed that there is a human aversion to the really random.

Alan Turing was a resounding mathematician, in his thirties, who sadly eventually committed suicide. He published epoch-making papers both before and after working at Bletchley Park. He also designed mechanical devices called "bombes" which we used to try multiple iterations in searching for patterns in the codes. They helped a lot.

There was a great gang of Americans who came over when they joined the way. They made more bombes, and their leader was a great chap called William Bundy, who was later assistant Secretary of State. I wrote to him during the Vietnam war asking him to pull out the troops, and got a reply saying "there is only so much influence that I have".

MLA:   The Enigma code machine that the Germans developed had 5 wheels with the letters of the alphabet in different sequences, and by choosing 3 of the wheels to use, and the order in which they operated, it generated a new code each time. How did you go about deciphering a code?

NF:       Well we had to think in order. Three wheels were chosen eg. 1, 5 and 3, and they always avoided clashes the next day, which reduced the possibilities to 30 for only the non-clashing wheel-orders.

The day would normally start at 8.00 am, and we worked with three wheels, setting for the day, three moving wheels, and fixed ones. It was helpful sometimes when a whole month's code could be pinched from a captured submarine, but most times we had to build the whole thing from scratch. The variables included a set of pairings; ten sets, not the whole alphabet. By putting a set of letters, like A and C, in the original settings there were 26 x 26 x 26 possibilities, 5 wheels, and 60 permutations including the order of the wheels and the choice of 3 from the 5 possible wheels. The Germans would choose the letters and the numbers randomly. They didn't take account of the fact that the messages were largely stereotyped, which made the codes easier to break.

A message might come in with some scrambled stuff, rubbish, at the beginning: NULL X SEQS X NULL X   WETTER UEBERSICHT KEINE AENDERUNG (.... Weather outlook: no change).

MLA: I understand that until about 20 years ago you were not allowed to talk about this under the Official Secrets Act?

NF: It was strange the way this came about, because Squadron Leader Higginbottom or someone published a book that gave the game away. The main secret was the extent of the code. The Germans had always been convinced that the code was unbreakable. By using great attention to detail, we got there. One of the ways they had started to slip up was using rude German words which we could decode. For the Germans to use the Enigma to its full extent, they had to take advantage of randomness, but it is very hard for people to generate randomness. My main claim to fame was dealing with the Luftwaffe code named "Red".

MLA: There has been at least one film, "Enigma", and a documentary featuring you. How do you feel about them?

NF: I thought the film was not bad. It was based on the novel by Robert Harris, which I somehow felt less real than the film. There seems to have been a portrayal of people forever grieving about rations and a suggestion that there were struggles for positions of power. This was not the case, maybe the ex-Dons would have been used to larger meals from when they were teaching at University, but I think that would be the only exception. Also our society was incredibly democratic and very buoyant. We would often take part in extra-mural activities such as joining in with plays or the choir and so forth. So actually there was a sense of excitement and enjoyment that I don't think the researchers have captured.  

MLA: Did you ever wonder what the German code setters where like?

NF: Not too much. Although I believe they were unaware of the fact we could break the code. We would then throw the results to Air force Intelligence who could then choose to act on it or not. You know, they didn't want to give the game away that we had broken the code, by always being exactly where the German forces were. For example, they would fly recon missions over areas we had given information on, so the Germans would have to think we had gathered information that way. When the Italians started using the Enigma, the Germans where still arrogant or naïve enough to think that it wasn't breakable.

MLA: What do you make of Churchill's phrase "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled"?

NF: It was nice to get the recognition, for obvious reasons. One or two people got gongs after the war.